I guess it's safe to say I am a fish out of water when I am at Power Plant.

Sure, it's not really that different from other malls. It is somewhat hidden away, sure, but it isn't that different from other malls. Or maybe it's because I am near one of the city's major malls, and frequent two relatively upscale ones much closer to me. The mix of stores isn't outrageously different. It even has a Uniqlo!

And yet, the people there are different. I was doing a quick grocery run there on Friday morning. The Marketplace is my usual grocery, only I go to the Shang, for proximity reasons. I know the mix there is a bit more aspirational than your usual grocery, but then, a bunch of financial transactions meant it is now owned by the Robinsons retail empire, and you know its products have shifted in a slightly different direction. (Either that, or my work means I am more familiar than most with how these things go.) But I don't get that many foreigners shopping when I'm at the Shang. I don't get a lot of house help following those said foreigners, either. At Rockwell, there's one or the other in every aisle.

I also see a lot of celebrities in that mall. The last time I was there, I kind of bumped into Maxene Magalona. Here lies an essay I never wrote about how you react when you see one of your childhood crushes a couple of decades down the line. (It isn't the first time that scenario happened to me.) This time, over lunch at the Grid - now that's a place no other mall has - I'm pretty sure Sam YG walked past me, and I may or may not have seen Pops Fernandez walk with a mask on.

"I was looking behind you, and I saw Camille Pratts and her family," Claud said.

Ah, yes, Claud. She's why I'm at Rockwell. For some reason we arranged to meet over coffee, which became lunch. But more pertinent to this, I am meeting Claud. Like, yes, I know her from college. She's one batch higher than me, someone I saw occasionally at the second floor of Miguel. We may have had some interactions during TeamComm meetings. But how we became friends after that, neither of us know. Social media? Surely. But what's the common thread? Claud's the sort of person I would be easily intimidated by, because of how much more accomplished she was, even when we were both still students. Like, she's the one who seemed to know what she wants to do, and already knows how to get there - something you can never say about me, even until now.

Maybe it's our musical preferences. We just somehow overlap, We apparently have a shared past of growing up with our parents listening to CityLite, Crossover or Joey on the radio. (There's another unwritten essay there, about how none of those stations are on air anymore, about how there are no more smooth jazz stations here anymore.) We don't necessarily like, or even know, the same acts - and surely she knows more than I ever will - but they still somehow overlap, so our few conversations online don't end with me trying to feign more than a passing familiarity. I guess it makes sense how she ended up contributing to the old music blog, and how she's the first person I told when I definitively decided to launch the new one.

So, yeah, we somehow ended up having lunch. Claud resolved to connect more with people in real life, which is an easy vow to make after lockdowns. Me, well, I had to get out of the house, too. I realize that while I'm used to talking to people in a professional setting - with all the events I have had to be in, especially in the past six months or so - I don't have much training when it comes to social gatherings. I don't have a lot of friends to invite, and those people are not available, because we're at this point in our lives when we really have to schedule lunches, dinners or even coffee chats. I wrote this lunch down on my planner!

At least it went well. Despite the fact that we haven't met socially before - and the last time we even saw each other was when we randomly bumped into each other at a mall, a story I don't remember - it felt like we were just picking up loose threads and continued with it. I suppose that's the advantage of being online these days. If you have the patience and the means, you can go as far back in time as you can to look back at what you talked about and how the conversation progressed since. That said - and trust me, a guy who's been blogging for almost eighteen years, on this - it's creepy. You're not supposed to remember every detail; you just let them drift away until it gets raised again. I suppose that's the magic of conversations over a lunch of soba or porkchops, and later, over coffee and a sad chocolate doughnut.

I suppose our advancing age also means we already kinda know how to proceed with these conversations, although the apprehensions and traumas of the times when we didn't know would somehow prevail. Me, I'm always apprehensive about meeting new (and new-ish) people under social pretenses, because I feel I will always fuck up the whole thing and make a bad impression. But I look back at the new friends I had made (and, sadly, lost) over the past decade. I did fine. Everything else was out of my control.

The next thing we know, it was three in the afternoon, and the conversation was running dry and we both had other things to do. How do you end these things? Online, you just drop off and resume as you wish. Offline, you have all these formalities. And even then, it's different in professional settings, where people are expected to drift in and out of networking duties, as opposed to social ones. Well. I suppose that's something I have to learn again now that I have all the time in the world to invite people and be turned down.